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Online friends and the hilarity that is FRIENDSHIP FAILS OF EMMA NASH by Chloe Seager

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Emma Nash is back….and determined to work out the world of friendships and relationships once and for all (…ish).

Now she’s in the sixth form, Emma’s expecting life to be a breeze but when her best friend Steph suddenly has a boyfriend who she’s spending more time with Emma’s not sure what to do with herself.

So Emma’s got a mission in mind: making new friends. Signing up for the school fashion show seems like the perfect opportunity. Although soon, through a series of mishaps that are absolutely not Emma’s fault (well, sort of), her world is teetering on the edge of disaster again.

Would going back to creating a life for herself online reaaaaaallllyyy be so bad?

First off, if you haven’t read it yet, go check out Editing Emma. I also interviewed Emma (yes, star of the book) after the release of her first diary. It’s fantastic and gives you a clue on what Emma is like.

But if you don’t want to go read the interview, I can tell you what Emma is like. She’s funny. She’s a bit selfish and immature. She likes to masturbate (YAY FOR POSITIVE FEMALE SEXUALITY REP). She can put her foot in her mouth.

Emma is me. Emma is you. Emma is everyone to some extent.

Each book in the Emma Nash series shows a journey that I think we all go through at some point. Hell, probably multiple times because we’re silly humans and keep forgetting the lessons we learn. In Editing Emma, Emma learned for herself that boys are not the most important thing in the world and she doesn’t need to be in a romantic relationship to be a worthwhile person or have a fulfilling life.

What’s the natural progression from that (which I know from personal experience)? Becoming a Friend Person, i.e. vowing to spend more time with your platonic relationships because you don’t need a man. [insert sassy hand gesture here]

But hey, guess what, the world doesn’t revolve around you! Everyone is on their own journey, so while Emma was ready to focus on her friends, her friends were getting on with their own lives. Cue another existential crisis!

After having a bit of wine, I went on IGTV for the first time to share why the Emma Nash books are so great (and important). You can watch slightly tipsy me in my lovely new IKEA armchair (the reading throne) here. To sum it up, Chloe has written Emma in such a way that we’ve effectively got access to the internal train of thought of a teenager. Funnily enough, not a lot changes in the way you think as you get older besides acquiring more experience and knowledge (at least as far as I’ve noticed), so I found Emma incredibly relatable once again, and I’m pretty sure the me 10 years ago would have found Emma very relatable, too.

Anyway, what’s great about having this train of thought in a book is that we are exposed to an unfiltered character. We all have thoughts that we wouldn’t dare speak out loud because they’re mean/paranoid/immature/jealous/weird/etc. And we see everyone else filtering themselves, so we don’t realise that all of our terrible/wacky thoughts aren’t that unusual. This book is so incredibly validating of our humanness. It made me feel less weird, and I think it could make other people – teen or adult – feel less weird, too.

Basically, we get to go on this journey of becoming a functional adult alongside Emma, experiencing everything alongside her through her inner thoughts. Not only is it such a fun journey, but we can learn something along the way, too.

Online friends and my beastie

No, I did not edit this video, and I learned after that Photo Booth does not record videos in HD. Boo, Photo Booth. But hey, I’m not a booktuber so…

About Chloe Seager

Chloe Seager grew up in East London with her mum and much-loved cat, Katie. She studied English Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia, where she sadly realised she couldn’t act, but did rediscover her love of children’s books.

Children’s Literature was one of her favourite modules, and it made her wonder why grown-ups ever stopped reading them. She now works with YA and kids’ books full-time. Chloe lives back in East London with her boyfriend and pet fish. Her debut novel Editing Emma was one of the first titles to be acquired for new imprint HQ YA and was published in August 2017.

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